Burton’s ‘Sweeney Todd’ is a gruesome work of art

Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter feed off each other in the film.

By DONALD MUNRO

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

See the blood.

It’s there in buckets in the gloriously macabre and stunningly acted “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”: splashing, spurting, erupting in spectacular geyserlike arcs that suggest the yee-haw giddiness of a Texas oil-field strike. Director Tim Burton depicts the essential bodily fluid not in terms of mere gore-tech realism but as a rapturous, over-the-top art element. It’s water ballet with blood instead of water.

At one point late in the movie, after we have watched one bare throat after another meet the heft and polish of Johnny Depp’s straight-edge razor, the ensuing blood doesn’t merely gurgle or splatter. It whooshes down as if in a sheet from the throat of the victim, a beautiful and terrible waterfall of red, as if a liquid curtain has suddenly descended.

Such grand and gruesome artistry is to be expected from the fertile Gothic mind of the man who made “Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Sleepy Hollow.” His world seems four or five shades darker than most of the rest of us. What was not as expected in this highly anticipated movie version of Stephen Sondheim’s stage classic was just how successful Burton would be at making a musical.

It is, in a word, an exquisite adaptation.

And with its bravura mix of explicit violence and pounding musicality, probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

When performed on stage, “Sweeney Todd” requires an almost snappy approach. The material is dark, yes, but the violence in this classic macabre storyline — about a vengeful barber and his obsessed landlady who wind up killing most of their customers and baking them into meat pies — has to be tamped down for logistical considerations. And the singing has to be rousing, not only to carry to the back of the balcony but to convey the intensity of what’s happening on stage.

But a movie can be close and intense. Acting trumps singing. While both Depp (as Sweeney) and the outstanding Helena Bonham Carter (as the pasty Mrs. Lovett) do not have strong voices, they resonate in ways that few actors do on screen today. Even the merest twitch of a facial muscle from them can convey as much as a belted-out aria.

Sondheim’s brilliant songs and lyrics — from the crisp patter of “A Little Priest” to the haunting refrain of “Not While I’m Around” — fall into place in a way that seems organic, and Jonathan Tunick’s sumptuous orchestrations help support the sometimes slight voices.

Depp and Bonham Carter feed off each other in this story: her character drawing sustenance from his insatiable thirst for revenge, his character reveling in her obsession for him. The rest of the cast is exceptional as well: Alan Rickman’s evil (yet nuanced) Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall as the slimy Beadle Bamford, Jamie Campbell Bower as the wide-eyed Anthony, Sacha Baron Cohen as the blackmailing Signor Perelli and Ed Sanders as Toby, the puppyish yet perceptive boy who works in the pie shop.

The result is a musical that I dare say works even better on screen than on stage. When Mrs. Lovett sings “By the Sea,” for example, and we’re suddenly transported to a wacky (and eerie) fantasy world of light and color, the song finally seems at home — and illustrates the character’s obsession — in a way that it never quite does in the stage version.

Through it all, of course, is the blood. More horrific than gun violence, the killings in “Sweeney Todd” are more personal. Blood is life, and to watch it flow reminds us of the tenuousness of existence. We’re human, after all. We all bleed. And sing.